That Guy Who Sleeps in Church

There was a guy in the church that I grew up in that always fell asleep. I mean always, as in every Sunday without fail... as soon as the preacher started preaching. What made it worse was that he sat up front and everyone could see him. Oh yeah, and he would snore. For those of us good pharisees, we talked about it. And as all good pharisees do, it was behind his back. There was even a meeting among the church leaders to decide what should be done about it.

That experience was one of many in my upbringing as a pharisee. That would be my youth and young adult upbringing in the church, not what my parents taught me to be. I have no doubt that there have been good, God honoring, and honest people in every church that I have been a part of, but I learned from an early age how to judge people like the Sleeper.

Recently, I noticed a man sleeping in church again. It was tempting to fall into the same mindset, roll my eyes, and go back to taking sermon notes like a good Christian. Instead, I watched him from the corner of my eye for a while and witnessed something I never expected.

Psalm 7: 1 - 2 NIV "Lord my God, I take refuge in You; save and deliver me from all who pursue me, or they will tear me apart like a lion and rip me to pieces with no one to rescue me."

What most people wouldn't know about this man is that he shows up much earlier than most everyone else, gets on his knees at the front of the church, and prays. As I watched him on this Sunday, I saw peace in his face as he slept. There is no telling what he faces day in and day out. One thing was obvious though - no matter what the troubles in his life are, he believes that God is physically present in that church.

Since he knows that God is there, he feels protected and is very literally taking refuge in His presence. It doesn't matter if he heard a word of the sermon. He is experiencing God's love and grace in that time that he finds tangible rest and peace in Him. That, my friends, is something that we could all take a lesson from.

That Sinking Feeling

In Matthew 14:22 - 33, we read the story of Jesus walking on the water and Peter going out to meet Him. If you're familiar with the story, then you know that Peter makes it out part way, loses focus, and starts to sink. Only by crying out for Jesus to save him does he come out of the story safely.

For a long time, this story had been, well, just a story to me. A cute reminder that we should always look to Jesus. After all, I'm not trying to walk on water, I'm just trying to navigate life. Like most things in the Bible that have become more and more real to me, it took experiencing the tangible reality of this historical event to really understand what we can learn from it. 

I've referenced the shame of what is in my past on several occasions. I hate the man that I allowed sin to turn me into. The more I've returned to "normal" life, the more distant I am from those events and more distinctly different I am to the point that it literally feels like that was a different person. Still, the realities that it was my life hit me hard from time to time. 

The times that I have shared my testimony and story with others, I have been confident in the work that Christ has done in my life and that the change was obvious to the person I was speaking to. This time though, the risk was different than what I had been placed in before. Instead of looking to Christ and being confident in the work He has done, I looked back at my past in fear of being defined by it. I was scared. I started sinking as the fear began to instill a sense of panic. 

Fortunately, I had the opportunity to be reassured by who I was with and to stop and pray for Jesus to save me from sinking again. Sure enough, my confidence began to return as I changed my gaze from looking back to looking forward. It's never easy to confront those things in our past that we're ashamed of. Sometimes we do lose sight of the cross and begin to sink. It's incredibly comforting to know that He will still save us when we call on His name, even when we think we're supposed to have it all figured out.